The 1920s was a period of rapid urbanization (growth of cities), technological inventions, widespread prosperity, social rebelliousness, cultural upheaval, and political conservatism. Alcohol was outlawed with the 18th Amendment and women began voting with the 19th Amendment. For the first time in American history more people lived in towns and cities than lived in the country. The post WWI wave of strikes, bombings, anti-Communist fear, and race riots led many to want to return to what they called "normalcy," or the way things had been before the 1920s.
The American economy was great after WWI, economic growth broke records, jobs were plentiful and most incomes went up during the decade. By 1929 the US enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. Construction was at an all time high, new inventions such as the bulldozer, dump trucks, tractors, and steam shovels, made work easier and faster to complete. Mass production was in full swing in most industries. During the war people had to save money instead of spend it and after the war they were ready to spend money which created a consumer culture built around carefree spending. Reckless spending took the place of saving and stores began to come up with ways to attract buyers through credit. Electricity gave rise to factories working around the clock and became widespread enough to be used in homes. In 1920, 35 percent of homes had electricity, by 1930 almost 70% of homes had electricity.
Charles Lindbergh
In 1927, twenty-six year old Charles A. Lindbergh, a St. Louis based mail pilot, made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, traveling from NYC to Paris in 33 hours. Five years later, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
Charles Lindbergh
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Amelia Earhart
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Car Culture
Ford's Model T car.
The first motor car sold in 1895, but it was expensive and not very simple to operate or work on. In 1903 Ford Motor Company led by Henry Ford developed an assembly line to make the production of his cars more affordable. In 1908 Ford created the Model T for the price of $850 ($22,000 in todays money), but by 1924 the cost was $290 ($4,000 in todays money). Other car companies sprang up and soon most Americans owned a car. This led to the expansion and development of roads and highways. It also led to the invention of gas stations and motels. Families could now go on vacations and travel like never before. The invention of the affordable automobile allowed Americans a new found independence never before experienced. It changed the way cities were laid out because now workers could live outside of the city limits in suburbs and commute to work in the cities.
The Jazz Age
Louie Armstrong
A new type of music that was a dynamic blend of several musical traditions first emerged as piano based form of music. African-American musicians combined ragtime music and blues music to create Jazz. Louie Armstrong became the most famous of the Jazz musicians of the 1920s. He was born a New Orleans shack in 1900, the grandson of slaves, his father abandoned he and his mother when he was born. He learned to play the trumpet at an early age and watched other Jazz innovators until he was in his teens and began playing his own music. He moved to Chicago where his music became very popular and soon he was traveling across the US playing Jazz. Jazz clubs opened up in cities across the country and people flocked to them. Others believed that Jazz music promoted dancing that was inappropriate and tried to get Jazz banned in many places.
African American Life
African-American life changed in the 1920s mostly due to various aspects of the Great Migration mentioned in the last unit. As many ex-sharecroppers from the South moved to the North to get factory jobs, many in the Deep South moved to southeast Missouri to farm newly created cotton fields from recently drained swampland. Farmers in southeast Missouri paid better prices than most farmers in the Deep South and thousands of African Americans from Mississippi and Alabama moved to the Missouri bootheel. Life was not easy, but it was easier living in the Missouri bootheel than the Deep South where they were always in danger of white supremacists.
The mass migration of blacks to the North allowed for civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to grow and become a political force. The NAACP mainly focused on legal action to bring the 14th and 15th Amendments back to life. Blacks in the South had long been barred from voting, but blacks in southeast Missouri were not barred from voting and were often sought by local politicians in order to get their vote which gave them a degree of power they had not experienced in the South before.
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Meanwhile in New York City, so many blacks had moved to Harlem that the nation's first black literary and artistic movement occurred, called the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem is located in northern Manhattan, in 1890 only one in seventy residents were black, but by 1930, it was one in nine. Such a rapid growth generated a sense of common identity, growing power, and self-expression grew. It turned Harlem into the cultural capital of African-American life. The Harlem Renaissance produced dozens of novels and volumes of poetry, several broadway plays, short stories, essays, and films.
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Harlem, 1930
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While a lot of the 1920s was filled with new cultural ideas and innovations, there was large element of society that did not like the cultural changes that were occurring. Most of this opposition was based on the idea of nativism, the fear of and prejudice against immigrants from countries outside of Western Europe. Others wanted to return to what they called the "old ways" of traditional living. Which meant they did not like that women had more independence and that blacks were becoming a new political force in some regions of the country. The U.S. saw a huge influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, including Russia, as well as nearly 200,000 Mexicans that migrated to states in the southwest and California. This influx of new people from different cultures led some Americans to worry they would take jobs and change their ways of life. To counter some of the immigration, the U.S. passed the Immigration Act of 1924 that reduced the number of immigrants that could come to the U.S. from Eastern Europe.
On May 5, 1920, two Italian immigrants who described themselves as revolutionary anarchists (anarchists do not believe in bowing to any government authority) eager to destroy the American government. Shoemaker Nicola Sacco and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for stealing $16,000 from a shoe factory and killing the paymaster and a guard. Both men were armed when they were arrested, both lied to police, and both were identified by eyewitnesses. However, the stolen money was never found, and several people claimed to have been with both men far away from the scene of the crime when it occurred. In July 1921, they were convicted and sentenced to death. They were executed six years later. Many people, especially Italian immigrants believed the men were innocent and the victims of capitalistic injustice.
The New Klan
The New Klan was a revival of the old Klan of the 1870s. The new Klan played off of the hysteria of immigration and the quickly changing American culture. It preached that it was different than the old Klan in that it was purely political, which proved to not be the case. The New Klan grew larger than any other time in the violent history of the organization reaching over 4 million members. The Klan called for militant patriotism and restrictions on immigration, voting, and a strict moral code. Many that joined the Klan were nativists, or believed that those who had been in America for generations were better than immigrants and minorities. The Klan was against bootleg liquor, labor unions, and added a hatred of catholics to its long list of hated people. It was against communists, atheists, prostitution, and adulters. The new Klan went after anyone it believed was participating in gambling, alcoholism, and other sins. It attracted whites from all walks of life but had more power in the Midwest than it did in the South, something that made the New Klan different from the old. After its leader was convicted for rape 1925, membership began to fall. Many states created anti-Klan laws and by 1930, barely 100,000 people were members of the Klan, most of them lived in the deep South.
The New Klan in Southeast Missouri - the first newspaper account that mentioned the New Klan in Southeast Missouri was found in the Dexter newspaper in 1921, it mentioned that Klansmen were interrupting church services and donating money to various churches in support of what they viewed as important virtues to protect.
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Fundamentalism
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During the 1920s there was a surge in fundamentalism, which is a religion that believes in a literal truth of the Bible, not metaphors. They believe in traditional teachings of the Bible exactly as they appear in the text. An example would be: many people believe that the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale is a metaphor about life, fundamentalists believe that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale. Fundamentalism is the opposite to another religious form of worship called modernist. Modernist sought to merge traditional Christian ideas with science. For example, religious fundamentalists did not believe in evolution, but modernists believed that God created evolution. There was sort of a struggle between religion in the U.S., the idea of fundamentalism and modernists, which really came to the center stage of newspapers during the Scopes Trial. In 1925 Tennessee outlawed the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in schools. John T. Scopes of Dayton, Tennessee, was arrested for teaching evolution in his science classroom. One side viewed the trial of Scopes as states rights, the other side believed it was about freedom of speech. The judge had to remind the defendant and the prosecution that only whether or not Scopes had taught evolution in class was on trial, not the question of evolution or religion in the classroom itself. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution but the Tennessee Supreme Court through it out on a technicality. The Scopes Trial showed the widening gap of beliefs about religion in America.
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John T. Scopes, second from left.
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Prohibition
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One big success that fundamentalists had was in the outlawing of alcohol, called prohibition, which became the 18th Amendment to the Constitution on January 16, 1919. Religious leaders believed that alcohol was sinful while urban progressives believed it led to violence and domestic problems. Prohibition was probably one of the most ambitious reforms of the 20th century but it was ultimately a failure. Instead of making people stop drinking, it actually caused millions of Americans to break the law. The National Prohibition Act of 1919, also known as the Volstead Act, explained the law under the 18th Amendment, but there were so many loopholes in the law it was destined to fail. It didn't specifically outlaw the drinking of alcohol, only the making, distribution, and sale of it. People stockpiled alcohol before the law took effect. Others got around the law by putting alcohol in bottles labeled as medicine. People began making illegal alcohol at home and selling it, called bootlegging, it became a major problem in the 1920s and led to the creation of crime organizations built around it. The efforts to ignore prohibition generated police corruption and encouraged the growth of organized crime. Illegal alcohol supplied crime organizations with income like that led by Al Capone, a famous gangster in the 1920s and 1930s. The newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation went after Capone and eventually arrested him for tax evasion where he was sentenced to eleven years in prison at Alcatraz.
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Al Capone
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The Battle of Blair Mountain
In August of 1921, miners in West Virginia were tired of treatment they received by mine owners in Southern West Virginia. For two decades they had tried to start the United Mine Workers of America union in West Virginia without success. When a popular town marshal and friend to the miners, Sid Hatfield, was assassinated by mine guards, the miners of West Virginia decided to organize and march from the state capital in Charleston, West Virginia to the very anti-union county of Logan. Nearly 10,000 marchers marched on the road to Logan, when they got to Blair Mountain, a mountain located on the Logan County line, they encountered 3,000 private deputies hired by anti-union sheriff of Logan County Don Chafin. What resulted was a two week war that was the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War. Mine operators did not want the union in their mines because that would mean the miners would be able to organize strikes and demand more pay and better working conditions. If a union was established in the mine, that would mean that every miner that worked there would be made to be in the union, making it very powerful. Mine operators and owners wanted open shop which meant a worker did not have to belong to a union to work at their mines. Eventually the miners were stopped after the president of the US sent in troops to put the strike down.
President Warren G. Harding and the Teapot Dome Affair
President Warren G. Harding
President Warren G. Harding found that a lot of scandal and corruption existed in his administration. Government officials had stolen government property and the attorney general was involved in selling federal prison paroles, pardons, and judgeships. The most serious scandal was the Teapot Dome Affair. The Teapot Dome was a government owned oil field in Wyoming. Hardings director of the Department of the Interior was selling contracts for oil companies to drill on government lands which was illegal. While Harding did not know of the scandal until it was revealed to him after the fact, his inattention to his cabinet members made him a very unsuccessful president and left his administration with a legacy of corruption.
President Calvin Coolidge
President Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge took over as president after President Harding suffered and died from a heart attack. Born on July 4, 1872, he was raised with a very traditional family and believed heavily in personal integrity with a devotion to public service. Coolidge had determined that he would not be an activist president, or one that expands the power of the presidency much like Teddy Roosevelt had earlier in the century. Coolidge believed that the government was too active in creating laws and interfering with business. He was known for sleeping twelve hours a day and taking afternoon naps. He believed that Congress created too many laws and vetoed over 50 laws proposed by Congress during his presidency. Coolidge's presidency is one where he did very little, he encouraged the growth of big business and believed that it was the only way to really see the country prosper.
President Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover had been the secretary of commerce under President Coolidge. He was born in 1874, orphaned at age 8, and raised by uncles in Iowa and Oregon. He attended college at Stanford and afterward became a mining engineer, oil tycoon, financial wizard, and multimillionaire before the age of forty. He was very confident in his abilities and began in his twenties with the idea that he would some day be president. When Coolidge chose not to run for president in 1928, Hoover became the republican nomination for president. Because the years under Coolidge were prosperous for the nation, the Republicans were given credit for the economic growth and easily elected Hoover to the presidency. Because Hoover was known to be a wizard at business, the hopes of investors on Wall Street grew with excitement which led the stock market to be strong (called a Bull Market).
The stock market grew to record levels which led to speculation. Speculation means that investors assume they will make money in investing in stocks and buy up all the stocks they can and then try to sell them at a higher value than they are currently worth, which is financially dangerous. An investor would make a small downpayment on buying a bunch of shares of stock, he would then borrow the rest from a stockbroker, if the stock made money (as they had in 1927-1929, the investor would be able to pay the loan back and reinvest the profit in more shares. In mid 1929, production of steel, oil, and other major industries began to slow, but the stock market continued to grow, then in late September and early October of 1929, prices began to level out and many people began to sell their stocks. As more and more investors sold their stock, the stock market began to fall. On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed further downward than it ever had before. Brokers found themselves flooded with stocks they could not sell, they lost $15 billion in one day and few days later they had lost $50 billion. Fortunes were lost and careers ruined. Investors who lost everything panicked, some even committed suicide.
The stock market grew to record levels which led to speculation. Speculation means that investors assume they will make money in investing in stocks and buy up all the stocks they can and then try to sell them at a higher value than they are currently worth, which is financially dangerous. An investor would make a small downpayment on buying a bunch of shares of stock, he would then borrow the rest from a stockbroker, if the stock made money (as they had in 1927-1929, the investor would be able to pay the loan back and reinvest the profit in more shares. In mid 1929, production of steel, oil, and other major industries began to slow, but the stock market continued to grow, then in late September and early October of 1929, prices began to level out and many people began to sell their stocks. As more and more investors sold their stock, the stock market began to fall. On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed further downward than it ever had before. Brokers found themselves flooded with stocks they could not sell, they lost $15 billion in one day and few days later they had lost $50 billion. Fortunes were lost and careers ruined. Investors who lost everything panicked, some even committed suicide.
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The national economy began to crumble. In 1930, nearly 30,000 businesses shut down. This led to a recession, or shrinking of the economy, the stock market crash revealed that the prosperity of the 1920s was built on a weak foundation. By 1932, almost 10,000 banks had shut down. By 1932 the country was in the Great Depression. The Great Depression was caused by overproduction and underconsumption. The country was producing more than it was buying. People had been borrowing too much money without making profits and were unable to pay back loans. Business owners had made huge profits but they had not given wage increases to employees so that they could purchase more products which would have balanced out the market. By 1932, one out of every four Americans was out of work. Farmers hoping to keep up the post WWI boom of crop production, lost European markets once they began producing their own crops, yet farmers did not slow their own production so there was a surplus of unsellable crops which forced farmers to default or fail to pay back loans. Droughts made farming even more unsuccessful which led to farmers losing their farms and moving to cities only to find there were no jobs.
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By 1932 over 12 million Americans were jobless but still had to feed their families. Organizations like the Salvation Army did their best to feed as many people as they could. Surveys conducted at schools showed that a quarter of the countries children were malnourished. Hungry people lined up at soup kitchens where churches and charities distributed small amounts of food, other rummaged through the trash set out by restaurants. Thousand of Americans lost their homes because they could not pay their mortgages. Some were able to move into poorhouses or large residential buildings that were divided into small apartments for homeless families. Some counties set up poorhouses (sometimes called county homes). During this time children suffered the worst. In the best cases, the children of homeless parents were sent to live with relatives, some were sent to live with friends, while others were abandoned with the idea that they would have a better chance to find someone to feed them if they were alone and without parents. The Great Depression threatened to undue the economic gains made during the Progressive Era and the late 19th century, it would take a drastic change in American politics and culture if America was going to survive.
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